Eugenie Rovai and I are hazards geographers who often collaborate on one
another's projects. A few years ago, I began to investigate risk communication
issues within public bureaucracies as part of my interest in the interaction
between risk assessment science and risk management policy.
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2 I call the framework I use "disaster by management." It was developed
during case studies of NASA and the Columbia accident, the FBI and 9/11, and
FEMA and Katrina.
Eugenie, meanwhile, began work on the use of National Forest and National Park
lands by criminal syndicates growing marijuana. We realized that our two
research directions complemented one another and, so, we began a new
collaboration, the topic of today's comments. I will first lay out the basic
elements of "disaster by management" from my earlier work and then summarize
the highlights of Eugenie's work on the marijuana situation in public lands.
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3 Disaster by management is the idea that disaster can be the result of
risky situations interacting with complex bureaucratic structures. A
bureaucracy segregates and ranks functions, such as risk assessment and risk
management. Risk assessment messages have to filter upward through various
layers of a bureaucracy. Each time, they are subject to competition from
other concerns, which necessarily dilutes them. A risk message's urgency can
be further diluted by managerial experience with other, similar situations
that did not end in catastrophe, leading to the "normalization of anomaly."
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4 Managers hearing a risk message face a dilemma. Statisticians are
familiar with these as Type I and Type II errors. Risk messages are
unavoidably uncertain, probabilistic. You never know whether you are
overreacting to a given risk by taking a precautionary approach, which could
squander budget and opportunities. On the other hand, you don't know whether
you are dismissing a serious risk by reacting only to situations that pass a
certain minimal threshhold, a decision which then turns out to hurt human life
or property. As a manager, you struggle to find the right balance, but you
also have to worry about how your boss prefers to set the balance between
these uncertainties.
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5 Affecting this internal balance in public agencies is the widespread
ideology of "managerialism," the belief that the private sector is inherently
more efficient than the public sector and should be a rôle model for public
agencies. This leads to quite a bit of concern about the costs of risk
management and a pressure towards
de minimis approaches, which, of course,
weakens the precautionary principle.
Another element of "disaster by management" is "normal accident theory," the
expectation that "stuff" will happen in complex systems and in complex
institutions. Once disaster begins, it may be too late for humans to get on
top of the cascading mess.
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6 Institutional organization is another element that comes up repeatedly
in the case studies. Complex bureaucracies or complex risk situations often
feature multiple chains of command. Sometimes these are competing agencies in
the same turf (e.g., the FBI and the CIA). Other times, there are functional
divisions within a single agency that may not be allowed to share information,
sometimes with good reason (e.g., the FBI's intelligence and criminal
investigation divisions). In still other situations, a single person may
answer to multiple chains of command (e.g., NASA).
Spatial organization
expresses and amplifies these tensions. In all these situations, risk
assessment science is lower in status and power than risk management policy,
which can trivialize a risk message a bit. Many organizations feature many
offices, but headquarters embodies the most powerful and prestigious parts of
the bureaucracy. This sets up additional filters for risk messages to
overcome: the geographical and psychological friction of distance.
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7 The outcomes of these elements are predictably dismaying. Risk
assessors and staff at local offices and low levels of the bureaucracy may be
aware of a looming danger and try to communicate risk messages up the
bureaucracy. There may be confusion about whom to notify. If the organization
is highly hierarchical, there may be reluctance to hammer a manager with
repeated, urgent messages, particularly if the manager is distracted by other
concerns or irritated by hearing about the situation again. Managers may be
too busy to react or reluctant to pester someone above them. Managers may be
under killer pressure to keep budgets under control and projects on schedule,
and they do not want to hear about a situation that may demand unscheduled
expenditures and delays. The upshot is that risk messages have to
overcome so much friction from so many sources that they may not trigger
effective action until after major disaster strikes.
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8 This may be the situation facing us in the National Forests and National
Parks, especially in California and in the case study of the North State.
For a couple of decades, these public lands have been increasingly used for
growing marijuana.
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9 California leads the nation in terms of numbers and acreage of illegal
marijuana plantations on public lands, but they are increasingly found
everywhere in the US ( Florida, Texas, and Kentucky, to name a few).
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10 At first, it was simply American countercultural types trying to avoid
having their personal real-estate forfeited during a drug bust.
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11 As the 1990s shaded into the new millenium, however, the sheer scale of
operations has exploded.
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12
Joining "Ma and Pa" since the late 1990s have been Mexican drug cartels,
especially after the post-9/11 border securitization. Cartels now dominate
public lands dope growing. We are currently unsure which cartels are
involved. Mexican Mafia prison gangs have been largely ruled out, and they
may not be the cartels traditionally working territories along the US-Mexico
border.
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13 Whoever they are, their gardeners are given $300 and run up from
Mexico through safe houses and placed on site as early as April. Each is
given some food and growing supplies, such as pesticides and fertilizers,
irrigation supplies, shovels, and axes and a .22 caliber rifle. These
gardeners (usually 2-3 per site) stay until fall when heavily armed cartel
higher-ups join them for harvesting and removal of the crop.
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14 If the gardeners can make it through the whole cycle, they will be
given $3,000, making them quite anxious to protect their crop. Additionally,
their managers and employers are extremely violent outfits, who turn up in the
gardens toward harvest time.
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15 The stage is set for confrontations between these desperate and armed
crews and the unwitting user of the public lands and employees of public
agencies. There have been sporadic confrontations between the crews and
members of the American public who stumble accidentally onto their gardens.
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16 There have been just epic impacts on local environmental conditions as
well. There are staggering amounts of trash, human feces, fertilizers,
pesticides, PVC piping, and lead in and around the hidden dwellings.
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17 Impacts on wildlife include poaching of bears and deer, to protect the
camps and food supplies of the workers, to protect the crop, for food, and,
sometimes in this kind of extreme isolation and boredom, just for fun.
Pesticides are everywhere to keep down rodents that might attack the crop or
living quarters. Native trees and shrubs are cleared, trimmed, poisoned, or
girdled and killed in order to allow more sunshine through the canopy into the
gardens. There are inadvertant impacts, too, notably the importation of
invasive exotic species other than marijuana, such as
Ailanthus altissima
(tree of heaven), sometimes just on gardeners' footwear or the tire treads of
vehicles used to drop off supplies.
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18 Particularly impressive are the hydrological and geomorphic impacts of
hidden marijuana cultivation. There is an amazing scale of water diversion
associated with this activity, which entails the construction of small dams,
plastic-tarp lined reservoirs for mixing of fertilizers, laying of miles of
PVC piping to distribute water from these dams and from streams and springs,
and chemical pollution downslope and downstream: There have been fish kills
in Northern California downwater from these operations. The living areas and
the growing areas are often terraced, because they are typically located in
steep terrain, and these slopes are often unstable. Habitual commuting
between the camps and the fields and out to get supplies has created soil
compaction and accelerated erosion as well. Fish are killed, not just by
chemicals, but by increased turbidity and deposition of these eroded
materials.
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19 Plants are not only grown on wilderness lands, but they are processed
there, too, often being dried in hidden shelters just before the cartels come
by to move the harvest and pay the workers.
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20 The camps and processing facilities are often elaborately camouflaged
from aerial detection efforts.
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21 Remote sensing is a tool that might help make patrolling of the public
lands easier. Marijuana has a very distinctive spectal signature of
reflectance, particularly in the blue-green and near-infrared, which can come
through even a forest canopy. It has been sporadically used since the 1980s
but often rather crudely. Contemporary hyperspectral and multispectral
sensors are much better, but their use would require a major Federal
commitment to fund frequent overflights or launch satellites and buy software
and laborpower.
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22 Without this, pot busts are serendipitous "whack and stack" affairs and
so relatively rare that the cost to benefit ratio of growing pot in the public
lands is favorable to the cartels. Particularly troubling with the "whack and
stack" approach to law enforcement is that law enforcement's priority has to
be arrest and termination of crime, not remediation of the environmental
damage done by these operations. It is estimated to cost, on average, about
$14,000 per acre to clean up and do basic restoration. Park and Forest
Service agencies simply do not have funds to ramp up these activities to meet
this new demand.
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23 Eugenie has had a number of interviews and converations with US
National Park and Forest Service personnel in the Whiskeytown National
Recreation Area in Northern California between Redding and Eureka.
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24 Impacts there have been tremendous: Whiskeytown seems to be
epicentral to pot growing in the North State.
Forest Service personnel report extreme frustration with the situation, given
that the Forest Service and Park Service budgets have been very low Federal
priorities over the last couple of decades. They are very understaffed and
find that pot enterprises in their jurisdiction are forcing them to take on a
law enforcement rôle for which they have little training or inclination.
Because of the danger to wilderness users, they diligently report every garden
they come upon, but the Federal and county law enforcement is so anxious to
stay one step ahead of the growers that they cut the Forest Service out of the
loop while they are conducting operations. These operations often require the
cessation of Forest Service activities, from trail repair, through public
education, to habitat restoration. These Forest Service activities, many of
them costly and difficult logistically, are simply thrown into abeyance until
law enforcement takes on a problem area, which they may or may not inform the
Forest Service people about. Forest Service staff feel that the lack of
communication from law enforcement is actively endangering the public by not
taking advantage of the public communication functions of rangers.
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25 In review, then, this marijuana situation has the earmarks of
"disaster by management": There are competing chains of command involved, and
they often work at cross-purpose. Law enforcement is rather secretive about information-sharing outside
its own stovepipe
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26, which ironically cuts it off from people who can help
improve their effectiveness through better GIS modelling. This secretiveness
ironically puts more people at risk, because the Forest Service and the Park
Service can't warn the public about situations they are not privy to.
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27 Information flow is diluted. There is occasional public reportage, and
Federal agencies report knowledge of the situation. There is little public
outcry, however, which enables the normalization of anomaly by Federal level
decision-makers. Tragedies do occur but only in the dribs and drabs of single
individuals being shot at, and the public is notoriously underconcerned about
risks that kill in ones and twos than in those that involve large numbers of
simultaneous victims.
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28 In conclusion, the public is in danger. So are the natural resources
and environmental quality of its public lands. There is potential for the
crazy levels of violence occasionally seen in parts of Mexico and Colombia due
to drug cartels' activities. Environmental damage is pervasive and
significant. And the problem is rapidly increasing across the country. A
failure of effective managerial response now, at the Federal level, may allow
the problem to scale up beyond any hope of control.
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